But I Beneath a Rougher Sea
by P. Honoria
Summary: AHS: Coven. Vignettes featuring Cordelia and Misty. Foxxay.
1. See What You're Doing To Me

~oOo~

Cordelia's tears trailed the length of two fingers. Falling from her nails, they merged as blood with the shallow mound of overturned earth beneath her palm. Her dark hands moved, covering the table's surface, collecting what dirt she could feel and placing it back in a pot. Dusting remains over the side to awaiting glassware.

On a screen tinted silver she imagined, as she worked, her disembodied arms raised above her head and striking. Stabbing the open air, the anger of her mother, her core. All that made Fiona cruel. The cigarette and alcohol soaked shadow she'd been since adulthood.

She breathed in and let the image, the feeling, fade. Parting her lips she pretended it would leave her soul by such means.

The raised gray arms turned to stone and crumbled to powder.

Without sight, the essence of plants she could feel and was calmed. Inhaling, she gripped the side of the table. The varying shades of green entered her mind and she knew that they still existed as she'd left them, when last she had sight other than in dreams. She could remember all herbs, glass bottles, beings and belongings along the wall.

The door opened, changing the feeling of the room, allowing inside a breath of cold air, one that enters the heart kindly; at one with falling water and youth. Cordelia knew the woman who entered, her sound, her soul. Her opened mouth, tongue over her lower lip sticking a for a second, making a soft click, almost a gasp, but not.

Cordelia saw in her mind the lace covering her body, the long blonde hair trailing down her back. How her tresses wavered with her steps, not knowing, as she who made the steps, when her progression would stop.

Cordelia smiled, thinking of her. How she must look, her eyes all alight, happy to again be near green life.

Her own tongue rolled over her lips. She leaned her head, as if to motion the warmth of Misty's continence forward, to her side.

Soon she was able to feel the energy from Misty's body, circling it as a shield; and could hear the Stevie inside. The voice and instruments playing as a record, all by heart known.

"What's that playin'?" Misty asked.

"Stevie," Cordelia replied, thinking only of the audible section of Misty's spirit.

"That ain't Stevie."

She'd forgotten the music of the room. Instinctively she turned her head toward the sound of her iPad in a corner, then back to Misty. "Oh," she blushed, running her hands across the table, "that's Kate, she's also one of us."

Misty said nothing, listening as she walked, checking the plants.

 _"With a kiss I'd pass the key and feel your tongue teasing and receivin_ _g._

~oOo~


	2. Floating

_For lalaleigh. Thank you._

~oOo~

Streaks of lighting collided with her dreams.

Pictures of deceased bodies flashed behind her eyes. Their skin, the flesh torn and mutilated from their bones. Memories, like snap-shots, of the times when there had been nothing she could do to save those killed. The countless lives of animals taken without point.

Misty forced herself awake, her wide-eyed gaze fixed on the ceiling, thoughts still a dream.

She heard escaping her mouth labored breath, and believing herself alive, chose to move hands which did not seem her own, laying crossed and at an angle on her chest. Spreading and bending fingers numb and lifeless, she lowered an arm to cool sheets.

The force of fear flooded her, her stomach, the hollows of sockets; releasing itself as pins under skin which raised to the surface in the form of hairs standing on end. She knew no way to stop the fear, save leaving the bed and the space where the air was the same as soaked with the blood of her nightmares.

She did not know where to go, only out. Beyond the room, to the greenhouse. The yard and its dew. To a window of sky.

Her bare feet carried her over the wooden floors and past closed doors of the darkened hall.

In one room she passed, she heard a woman crying softy.

Gently pressing her hands to the door, as if its fibers held a portion of the occupants' emotion, she realized whose voice she was hearing and, cautiously, she opened the door to Cordelia's room. Misty peered inside before entering, feeling as though several voices were persuading her to complete an action other than the one she was currently committing herself to act out.

The floor was to her the same as hallowed ground owing to the one it contained. The air, the time it possessed; the memories of a woman who had long lived within its walls. All the moments of Cordelia's past continued to live within the structure, and Misty considered herself an invader. A soul not invited but one hoping to be given a part in the timeless theatrics of ghosts.

In a flash of lightning, Cordelia was shown to be laying on the floor. It was as if she'd fallen from bed and not waken. One leg was bent oddly, her long hair pooled behind her head, face contorted, as if in sleep she were being exposed to a fate nearing death.

Quickly and in horror, Misty made her way to her side, repeating Cordelia's name with each step. She lowered to her knees, gently raising the fallen woman so that she might rest against her body rather than the floor. With her touch Cordelia gasped, her eyes rolling to the back of her head.

Panicking, Misty began to brush her hands over Cordelia's hair, in rushed tones asking of her state, to come back. _To please come back._

Cordelia's pulse returned to normal as did her breath. A wave of calm washed over her as she gripped the hem of Misty's dress. "So lonely," she muttered, moving her head to the side, a tear falling from the corner of her eye to Misty's knee. "All those nights living in the swamp by yourself. You were so alone."

Misty could think of nothing to say. Her heart was all that she could feel as she watched Cordelia weakly raise from the floor to a sitting position opposite her.

Cordelia, in her vision, had felt the lives of animals and people being returned to their bodies as Misty had healed them. She'd seen the girl frantically search through trunks of clothes and books, walk through tall grasses. Her body, her hair silhouetted gold as she walked open grasslands. Acres upon acres of dirt.

In blue parallel she had seen another life, one of severe loneliness. Isolation to a point nearing madness. Misty crying in bed, alone again after the boy had gone. No one. No one cared.

"I am so sorry you felt that way for so long."

 _She of lace, of earth._

Misty felt tears leave her eyes as she returned to her nights, but in her sadness she looked to the woman across from her and grief was replaced with warmth. With the kindness of one she'd come to love; in whose presence she felt welcomed and cared for.

Hearing only silence, Cordelia spoke, "I'm sorry if I made you upset."

Taking Cordelia's hand, Misty placed it to her cheek, making it cover her shed tears. "Not all of this is from sadness."

Cordelia brought her clasped hand to her lips, kissing the knuckles folded over her own before opening Misty's stained palm and pressing her mouth to the lines, taking into her the love and sadness of the other. Without pausing she moved closer, longingly touching her lips to Misty's. All the pain, the fire of her past, the loneliness, was released to mingle with all other memories hovering in the room's air. Waiting to again be released in dreams.

~oOo~


	3. Out of the Night

_For lalaleigh, EchoFallsFromGrace, aoxomoxoa, 'guest' and AngryHedgeHobbits whose 8tracks playlist, The Sun and Moon, was what I listened to while writing._

~oOo~

Floating with particles of dust was a malaise which made the room feel as if it were in the past. With the notion of existing in a preceding time, Cordelia briefly wondered if the touch under her thigh was that of another woman's foot.

A tremor overtook an eyelid, but Cordelia made no attempt to prevent possession, thinking it wrong to banish the emerging desolation. She stretched and bent her toes under her leg, her beating heart rising to her throat.

Hearing music drift from a device she'd forgotten, she was made to remember days outside and in. Moments when she could remember Misty's smile so clearly. Walking beside her on a sidewalk, feeding her, finding her; the images of her body always, always moving. Flourishes and all that fabric. The pale skin beneath, ankles and bare feet.

Her face sometimes red with an emotion she hadn't let her know.

Cordelia had so many times overheard Misty in mid-conversation with plants as she'd entered the greenhouse, singing Stevie as if to heal their leaves and roots when in states of weakness. And into that endlessness Cordelia had had no trouble falling. Into the beams, the sun colored stained glass.

Memories swam though her mind as swirls of lights. The feeling of warmth entering her nostrils, as sun rising from cement; of being turned, over and over in a circle, the earth anywhere but under her feet. In an infinite happiness.

The love she had for Misty was unlike any she had ever known; it reached beyond all others. It arrested and consumed.

Now she was alone, the same as buried. Without air, without any of the light of before. Her heart had been ripped from its cage and left to bleed. Separate from her body, it remained attached by a thin thread, as if intravenously keeping her alive. Alive when sometimes she did not wish to be.

The only death kind enough to descend on her was sleep, and willingly she was pulled under its dark currents until all human consciousness seemed to fade.

The repose death allowed her was dark, and the more she gave into it, drew from it as a drug, the further it pulled her downwards, to an underworld with the feel of sea's eternal tides. Her decent was an ink-stained collapse. The feel of fainting into herself.

In this world, lingering beneath tangled cords, was Misty, suspended as if a mirage amid violet colored rocks and caves. Cordelia couldn't always see her body, her face a faint outline, but it was her. She was alive.

Cordelia would feel the pull of Misty's breath, taking in the air that had once been in her lungs. And the pads of her fingers. In a line from a corner to the fullest part of her lower lip she moved, dragging ever so slightly downwards. There was a faint pain as nails tapped the edges of teeth, but the pain would spur within Cordelia a second pulse, one that beat outside her frame on a wave of sound, of violins, and with this second pulse she was given the strength to give in.

She pressed her hands to the cloudy image of Misty, reasoning forgotten. Moving with her, taking her into her arms once her body was restored.

Closing in around her, that which once had been known by flesh was now known by Cordelia in essence of her heart. The orb of caged light glowing as quartz, was parted from its prison and drifted to the light escaping Misty, perceived only by senses.

From this Cordelia would wake to an alarm, the face of a concerned girl, to an outside noise. In darkness she would fade. Forced to relive the rawness of her feelings, her love, knowing she was unable to do anything until night when again she would sleep.

~oOo~


End file.
